Jim Carson, who began his academic career at Kenyon in 1988, is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism. In addition to teaching at Kenyon, he held a visiting appointment at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the Restoration and eighteenth century. He is the author of Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel. His current research focuses on animals, especially dogs, in the Romantic period. His scholarly work has been supported by a Huntington/British Academy Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library and an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Short-Term Fellowship at the Clark Library at UCLA. He was the initial holder of the William P. Rice Chair in English and Literature (2012-2015).
Jim served a four-year term as English Department Chair and directed the Honors Program on three occasions. He has taken a particular interest in college service, chairing several committees of the faculty: the…
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Jim Carson, who began his academic career at Kenyon in 1988, is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism. In addition to teaching at Kenyon, he held a visiting appointment at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the Restoration and eighteenth century. He is the author of Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel. His current research focuses on animals, especially dogs, in the Romantic period. His scholarly work has been supported by a Huntington/British Academy Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library and an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Short-Term Fellowship at the Clark Library at UCLA. He was the initial holder of the William P. Rice Chair in English and Literature (2012-2015).
Jim served a four-year term as English Department Chair and directed the Honors Program on three occasions. He has taken a particular interest in college service, chairing several committees of the faculty: the Curricular Policy Committee, Faculty Affairs Committee and Resource Allocation and Assessment Subcommittee. For this work, he received the Kenyon College Distinguished Faculty Service Award in 2007.
Education
1986 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ. of California Berkeley
1979 — Master of Arts from Univ British Columbia
1975 — Bachelor of Arts from University of Alberta
Courses Recently Taught
ENGL 103
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 103
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.
ENGL 104
Introduction to Literature and Language
ENGL 104
Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.
ENGL 243
Satire, Sensibility and Enlightenment
ENGL 243
This course presents a survey of 18th-century literature from Jonathan Swift to such writers of the 1790s and early 19th century as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano and Maria Edgeworth. Early 18th-century literature is dominated by satirical works that ostensibly aim at reform through ridicule, even while the great satirists doubt that such an aim can be achieved. Beginning in mid-century, the literary movement of sentimentalism and sensibility rejects the satirical impulse and embraces sympathy, immediacy and the "man of feeling." Throughout the period — indeed already satirized by Swift and Pope — Enlightenment ideals are explored and debated in a new public sphere. These ideals include progress, secularism, universal rights, the systematization of knowledge and the growth of liberty through print and education. Through an examination of works in a variety of literary genres (prose and verse satire, periodical essay, novel, tragedy, comedy, descriptive and lyric poetry, and travel writing), the course will introduce students to such authors as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Thomas Gray. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered occasionally.
ENGL 251
Studies in Romanticism
ENGL 251
This course will focus on the lyric poetry of the Romantic period, from William Cowper to John Keats. We shall also consider criticism, autobiographical writing, essays and novels by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Keats. In this course, we shall investigate two central claims: first, that Romantic poetry is not simply nature poetry but rather philosophical poetry about the interrelationship between natural objects and the human subject; and, secondly, that Romanticism develops a notion of aesthetic autonomy out of very specific political and historical engagements. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.
ENGL 342
18th-century Novel
ENGL 342
This course aims to define the novel, to trace the causes of its rise in 18th-century England, to study some great and various examples of the genre from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, and to learn about a historical period quite different from our own even though we may find there some of the roots of our own culture. The novel will be defined against epic, romance, drama, historiography and newswriting. Various types of novel also will be distinguished: fictional biography and autobiography, epistolary fiction, the picaresque, the fictional travelogue, the Oriental tale, sentimental fiction and Gothic fiction. Particular attention will be paid to authorial prefaces, dedications and advertisements to determine what the novelists themselves thought about the emerging genre and how they imagined their relationship to the reader. This course also will provide an introduction to such major theorists of the novel as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ian Watt and Michael McKeon. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210– 291 or permission of instructor.
ENGL 351
The Romantic Period
ENGL 351
This course will explore some of the complexities and contradictions in the literature of the Romantic period. A period that came to be identified with the work of six male poets in two generations (Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Byron, Shelley and Keats) also is the period in which the English novel achieves considerable subtlety and broad cultural influence. In addition to the poets, then, the course will include works by such novelists as Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. While lyric poetry becomes increasingly dominant and the sonnet undergoes a revival in this period, there remains a poetic hierarchy in which epic and tragedy occupy the highest positions. The course will therefore include dramatic poems, whether or not such works were intended for performance, and a consideration of the epic impulse. The course will examine the tension between populism (and popular superstitions) and the elitist alienation of the Romantic poet, and the relationship between political radicalism and both Burkean conservatism and an abandonment of the political ideals of the French Revolution in favor of imaginative freedom. In addition, this course will introduce students to recent critical studies of Romanticism. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210–291 or permission of instructor.
ENGL 410
Senior Seminar in Literature
ENGL 410
Offered in several sections, this seminar will require students to undertake a research paper of their own design, within the context of a course that ranges across genres, literary periods and national borders. Students will study literary works within a variety of critical, historical, cultural and theoretical contexts. All sections of the course will seek to extend the range of interpretive strategies students can use to undertake a major literary research project. Each student will complete a research paper of 15 to 17 pages. Senior English majors pursuing an emphasis in creative writing are required to take instead ENGL 405. Students pursuing honors will take ENGL 497 rather than ENGL 410. Prerequisite: senior standing and English major or permission of instructor.
ENGL 453
Jane Austen
ENGL 453
This course will focus on the works of Jane Austen — from a selection of her juvenilia, through the six major novels, to the unfinished "Sanditon." Additional texts for the course will include Austen's letters and a biography of the author. The class will consider film adaptations of Austen's novels, both as these films are positioned within and as they escape from the nostalgia industry of costume drama. Austen's works will be situated formally in relation to the novel of sensibility, the "Bildungsroman", the comic novel, the tradition of the romance genre, and the development of free indirect discourse. Her novels also will be considered in relation to the late 18th-century development of feminism, controversies over women's education, and the formulation of the separate sexual spheres. Ultimately, the course will address how an author who claimed to work with "so fine a Brush" on a "little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory" responded to such major historical events as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, English radicalism and the abolition of the slave trade. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.
ENGL 493
Individual Study
ENGL 493
Individual study in English is a privilege reserved for senior majors who want to pursue a course of reading or complete a writing project on a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum. Because individual study is one option in a rich and varied English curriculum, it is intended to supplement, not take the place of, coursework, and it cannot normally be used to fulfill requirements for the major. An IS will earn the student 0.5 units of credit, although in special cases it may be designed to earn 0.25 units. To qualify to enroll in an individual study, a student must identify a member of the English department willing to direct the project. In consultation with that faculty member, the student must write a 1–2 page proposal for the IS that the department chair must approve before the IS can go forward. The chair’s approval is required to ensure that no single faculty member becomes overburdened by directing too many IS courses. In the proposal, the student should provide a preliminary bibliography (and/or set of specific problems, goals and tasks) for the course, outline a specific schedule of reading and/or writing assignments, and describe in some detail the methods of assessment (e.g., a short story to be submitted for evaluation biweekly; a thirty-page research paper submitted at course’s end, with rough drafts due at given intervals). Students should also briefly describe any prior coursework that particularly qualifies them for their proposed individual studies. The department expects IS students to meet regularly with their instructors for at least one hour per week, or the equivalent, at the discretion of the instructor. The amount of work submitted for a grade in an IS should approximate at least that required, on average, in 400-level English courses. In the case of group individual studies, a single proposal may be submitted, assuming that all group members will follow the same protocols. Because students must enroll for individual studies by the seventh class day of each semester, they should begin discussion of their proposed individual study well in advance, preferably the semester before, so that there is time to devise the proposal and seek departmental approval before the registrar’s deadline.
Academic & Scholarly Achievements
2010
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
2017
“The Great Chain of Being as an Ecological Idea.” In Animals and Humans: Sensibility and Representation, 1650-1820. Ed. Katherine M. Quinsey. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017. 99-118.
2016
“The Sentimental Animal.” In Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr. Ed. Alessa Johns. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016. 55-81.
2013
"One of Folly's Puppies': Austen and Animal Studies." In Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community. Ed. Laurence Raw and Robert G. Dryden. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 165-87.
2010
"Scott and the Romantic Dog." The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.4 (2010): 647-61.
2009
"Interracial Adventures: The Black Caribs of St. Vincent." In Adventure: An Eighteenth-Century Idiom. Essays on the Daring and the Bold as a Pre-Modern Medium. Ed. Serge Soupel, Kevin L. Cope, and Alexander Pettit. New York: AMS Press, 2009. 305-24.
2009
"The Author of Waverley and the Problem of Romantic Authorship." In Approaches to Teaching Scott's Waverley Novels. Ed. Ian Duncan and Evan Gottlieb. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. 50-58.
2004
"The Little Republic' of the Family: Goldsmith's Politics of Nostalgia." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (2004): 173-96.
1997
"'A Sigh of Many Hearts': History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Valperga." In Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. 167-92.
1996
"Britons, 'Hottentots,' Plantation Slavery, and Tobias Smollett." Philological Quarterly 75.4 (1996): 471-99.
1996
"Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction." In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 255-76.
1992
"Commodification and the Figure of the Castrato in Smollett's Humphry Clinker". The Eighteenth Century 33.1 (1992): 24-46.
1989
"Narrative Cross-Dressing and the Critique of Authorship in the Novels of Richardson." In Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. 95-113.
1988
"Bringing the Author Forward: Frankenstein through Mary Shelley's Letters." Criticism 30.4 (1988): 431-53.